This Is How We’ll Drive the Establishment ‘Crazy’: Beck Explains Merger of GBTV & The Blaze in Message to Audience

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Over the last few months we’ve been slowly pulling back the curtain on some of the big plans we have in store—plans that, with your support, will change the world. From new initiatives to feed the hungry, to voter registration drives, to collaborations with artists and musicians, to the Restoring Love events this July—we have set out to prove that combining big dreams with hard work is still the only recipe for lasting success.

Today, I’m excited to reveal the next part of the plan—and it involves three of our largest and most important projects: GBTV, our online streaming television network that hosts my daily show, TheBlaze.com, our extremely popular independent news and information outlet, and the Marketplace by Markdown.com, our e-commerce site featuring American small businesses.

Just a few hours ago I announced to my staff that we will be merging these three properties into a new, world-class multimedia network called “TheBlaze.”

This is a case where the whole will be far greater than the sum of its parts. By combining one of the world’s largest subscription streaming networks with a news site currently visited by over 7 million unique visitors a month and an e-commerce site that is reinventing the way small business owners find an audience, we will be creating a powerful new media entity.

We will now be delivering a mix of premium subscription content and free content on TheBlaze. Later this year, if you’re a subscriber and go to login at GBTV.com, you’ll be redirected to login at TheBlaze.com – and you’ll still be able to watch the premium video content on the web, iOS devices, Roku and Boxee. Meanwhile, TheBlaze’s free content will continue to be a mix of original reporting, curated news stories, opinion pieces, and video.

If you are a current user of any of these sites, rest assured that the content you love will continue. In fact, you’ll be getting a lot more of it. In the very near future, TheBlaze will begin offering original programming and video content on a 24/7 basis. In addition to the current GBTV lineup that will be coming over (including my daily radio and television shows, Real News, Liberty Treehouse, Independence USA, and The B.S. of A.), we’ll also be launching lots of new content on TheBlaze and expanding into new areas, like radio and publishing. But your experience will not change: If you subscribe to GBTV, your subscription will continue at TheBlaze; and if you enjoy reading the free stories on TheBlaze.com, you’ll be able to continue to do that as well.

I believe that merging these properties will help expose the critical news and information we report on daily to millions more people. By virtue of its size and committed user base, the mainstream will be unable to easily marginalize or ignore TheBlaze—or the stories we report on. I told you last year that we were going to drive the establishment in this country crazy—and this is how we will do it.

But the keyword is “we.”

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you readers, listeners, and viewers of GBTV and TheBlaze (now just “TheBlaze”) who have helped make this new venture a reality. Thank you subscribers for your trust and your willingness to come on this journey from the very beginning. I promise, this new entity is going to give you exponentially better content. Thank you readers for finding and sharing the news that the mainstream media has been ignoring. Over the past two years, Blaze readers have proven that there is a huge audience in this country for news that doesn’t pander for ratings, obscure the facts, or act as a mouthpiece for the White House.

Aside from all the amazing new content we will soon be delivering to you, the only big change will be the name. And as many of you probably remember from those early “Making of GBTV” specials, I never really wanted to call it GBTV anyway.